Crawling
by Rasiaa
Summary: There was a certain dark, mindless hunger residing in his gaze, the kind that came with hopeless starvation.


_AU, after season II._

* * *

It wasn't the first time she noticed.

Lizzy frowned and watched her husband walk into his office. The door clicked closed.

Reaching for her wedding band, she twirled it around her finger as she walked to the gardens. Reaching the door to the outside, she paused momentarily to open the door and then she resumed her walk.

As always, the garden was impeccable. The roses were as white as snow and as beautiful as the pristine icicles that would hang from trees and buildings come winter. She paused next to one that was in full bloom, and smiled sadly at it.

Her marriage was an unhappy one.

She hadn't expected it. She had known her Ciel for her entire life, after all. She'd always enjoyed his company, even after he returned from wherever he'd been after his parents' deaths. He'd been different then. Now, he was unrecognizable. He wasn't distant, like before, but closed. He loved her, so he said, and he proved it over and over again. To an outsider, it would seem like he was the perfect husband who adored her. But to her, it seemed as if every word rang hollow. False.

He never told her anything. Not really. Of course, they often had long conversation, but nothing about him ever came up. He never discussed his job. Never discussed his past. He never seemed to talk of anything important. He was evading her in the worst way.

She sat heavily on a bench in the middle of the roses and tugged sadly on her curls. She stopped and smoothed down her dress. It was a frilly pink little thing, Ciel's favorite, he told her. She wasn't sure she believed him entirely. He hardly even looked at her.

"What happened, my love?" she whispered, staring again at the wedding ring. It was the finest money could buy, the envy of all the women in the courts. Only the queen herself could hope for better. The finest gold, interlaced with silver to form the name _Phantomhive._ Priceless, perfectly cut diamonds on the top, always shined. She adored it.

But like everything else, it rang untrue.

She sighed and glanced upward, listening vaguely to the bells chime in the distance. Four, five, six times…

Had she really been out an hour?

Stifling a gasp, she shot up and hurried inside, holding the ends of her dress. Ciel would be wondering where she was.

True to form, as soon as she came through the door, Ciel was at her side, hands flitting over her, asking if she'd been hurt, if she was all right. "Are _you_?" she bit out. A mistake.

He pulled away immediately, eyeing her warily. Gone was her doting husband. In his place was a stranger, one that she had never seen before, but had known about.

His eye, previously wide and at least semi-friendly, was now cold and unfeeling. His expression shuttered. His posture portrayed disdain.

It made her heart ache. _What happened, my love?_ Where had her Ciel gone?

Who was this monster in his place?

"Fine," he said flatly. "Dinner is being served. You are to come and eat," he instructed, in that same, flat, emotionless tone that he adopted when he was guarding himself.

With that, he turned and walked down the hallway, disappearing around a corner, the edge of his black overcoat swaying with his movement. Ever graceful, ever poised, ever the gentleman, that was her Ciel. Even if he was acting oddly, at least one thing from her beloved remained.

She followed after him, not really seeing anything. When she made it into the dining room, Ciel was already seated, but there was no food on his plate. There never was anymore, she suddenly realized, her vision sharpening. She took her seat on his left, noting the meal on her plate. It looked good. It always did, she knew, casting a glance at the butler standing behind Ciel.

Sebastian had been friendly, too. He had always treated her kindly. Now, however, she noticed the downcast look in his eyes that anyone else would miss. He looked like he was wasting away. He preformed exemplary as he always did, but he took no pride in his work. He was as distant as Ciel was.

She ate mechanically, and if Ciel noticed, he didn't say anything. For the first time in a long time, the entire meal was silent. And it wasn't a good, comfortable silence. It was suffocating. She felt like crawling out of her skin.

Taking a risk, she asked, "Aren't you going to eat, Ceil?"

His eyes snapped to hers, and she inwardly winced. There was a certain dark, mindless hunger residing in his gaze, the kind that came with hopeless starvation. It was a look she sometimes saw Sebastian give Ciel. She blinked and it was gone, but she knew what she had seen.

She hadn't missed the narrow pupils and the blazing red eyes.

"I don't believe so," Ciel answered carefully. "I'm not hungry at the moment."

A lie.

"I see," she replied, and returned to her own meal.

When had her marriage dissolved into an endless dance of lies and false words?

Had it always been this way?

She excused herself. Ciel didn't look up from his plate.

…

Staring at the ceiling in her bedroom a few days later, she marveled again at the changes in her beloved Ceil Phantomhive.

His annoyance with her had faded.

Her annoyance with him had not.

She sighed again and sat up on her bed, looking at her door. It never opened unless her hand was on the doorknob. The servants, of course, came to clean, but they never touched her things, didn't move anything out of place. They were poor workers. She really had no idea what had persuaded Ciel to hire them, and why he kept those clumsy fools on the job. A crash followed by frantic yelling only furthered her confusion. Distantly, she heard Ciel start screaming, yelling abuse at the servants and threatening them in earnest.

At least he never hit them, as far as she knew.

She stood up and left her room, moving towards the noise. She saw a stack of plates broken on the floor, Mei-Rin on the floor in from of Ciel, who was huffing at her in obvious anger. She was mumbling apologies, but Ciel ignored her. "Clean it," he ordered, and swept passed her without ever noticing Lizzy.

But Mei-Rin did. She sat up and then bowed back down with a squeak, cleaning the glass haphazardly while she spoke too quickly for Lizzy to decode. Stifling another sigh, Lizzy knelt beside the distraught young woman, pushing the glass into a pile. "No, no!" Mei-Rin cried, taking the glass. "The Lady of the house shouldn't be cleaning, no she shouldn't!" Mei-Rin babbled.

"I'm not a china doll," Lizzy said, standing. "If you don't want my help, that's fine."

She walked in the same direction that Ciel had before Mei-Rin could reply.

She found her husband standing by an open window alone. She came up behind him silently, unsure if he knew she was there.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," Ciel said eventually.

Evidently, he knew. She looked at him, asking, "See what?"

"My incompetent servants," was his reply.

So he had known then, too. Did he always know?

"Of course," Ciel said, looking at her oddly. She hadn't noticed that she said it aloud. "I can hear you, you know. Your heels tap on the floor, despite the carpets."

She didn't know what to say, so she kept silent.

Ciel continued to look at her, and, apparently dissatisfied, he turned away to look at the window with a sigh. "Will you ever change, Lizzy?" he asked.

"What?" she said dumbly, confused. "Why?"

"You've been the same our entire lives. Go buy some dark dresses, highlight your eyes. Change your hair. Let it down. Paint your nails. Something," he suggested. "Let's all get some sort of make-over. I'm tired of this insipid lifestyle."

Staring at Ciel, she questioned, "And what will you do?"

He shrugged. "As long as it matches the Phantomhive color scheme and reputation, I'll change what you want me to change."

Once again, she found herself at a loss for a response. He didn't seem to want one, anyway.

…

She did as he asked. She let her hair down and hung up her pinks and whites. She took on a forest green instead, and used dark make-up to highlight her eyes. She painted her nails to match.

When she presented herself to Ciel, he stared at her, obviously confused. "Why did you do that?" he asked.

Equally confused and a little hurt, she replied, "You asked me to, Ciel, and I always want to make you happy."

He blinked and stared for another minute. Then, "I didn't think you would take me seriously. You were beautiful then, and you're beautiful now. Haven't I always said to do as you please?"

She closed her eyes.

…

Her marriage remained an unhappy one, and incidents like those continued for another year. Their third anniversary came and went, celebrated by everyone they knew. Ciel was as curiously evasive as he always seemed to be.

And gradually, she learned.

She learned his new triggers and his habits, little bits and pieces of his past that he never revealed to her, but that she picked up in secret places.

She learned, during sex one night that Ciel was, in actuality, not shy, but ashamed.

Ashamed of what, she didn't know.

She figured out that Ciel hated spiders more than anything because they were a favorite of an old enemy.

She didn't know who that was or why they were enemies or what happened.

She noticed that Ciel and Sebastian were the same.

The same curiosities, the same almost supernatural presence, the same vacant, endless hunger pains.

It was intriguing, watching the two of them interact when they didn't know she was watching. They didn't act like normal people.

It was almost like Sebastian resented Ciel for something, and that Ciel took a great deal of pride and happiness in whatever it was.

It wasn't until she discovered she was pregnant that she really figured out what was going on. And it sent her crashing into the ground.

…

Too excited for words, she couldn't bear to wait, and burst into Ciel's office without prompt. She saw as if from a distance Ciel and Sebastian whip around to face her.

She didn't register the high-heeled boots.

She didn't register the darkened, clingy uniforms.

She didn't register the black, sharp claws in their fingers.

She didn't register the fangs hanging out of their mouths.

She didn't register the identical tattoos.

She didn't register the hellish red eyes with narrow pupils and a deep hatred.

Not until Ciel started to scream.

It snapped her from her trance-like state, and she watched, horrified, as Ciel seemed to become more demonic before her eyes. He and Sebastian were something other than human, they were something entirely different than she could have ever imagined.

"Ciel…" she breathed, reaching for him. He snarled and grabbed her wrist, tugging hard. She fell forward into him, but he didn't even stumble. He stared at her, and she felt more than saw the pointed tail wrap around her neck.

"How do you feel, Lizzy?" Ciel breathed into her face, expression unreadable.

But she couldn't answer, too hypnotized by the blazing violet etching in his eye. It would have been beautiful in any other circumstance, but now she understood with a disturbing clarity why he always wore an eye patch over it. He would be labeled as the devil without a second thought and killed.

And she thought that he had lost the eye.

The tail, Ciel's tail, tightened around her neck. She sucked in a sharp breath. "You're a demon," she said it without thinking, and instantly regretted it.

What she didn't expect was for Ciel to let her go and double over in laughter.

"Finally!" he gasped out. "Finally you get it!"

She stared at the stranger she was married to in shock. This wasn't Ciel, and probably hadn't been for many long years. This was a twisted, grief-hardened remnant. She didn't know what to think. She didn't know how she should feel.

All she knew, watching Ciel transform back into his familiar humanoid form, was that her marriage would probably forever be an unhappy one, despite her child.

He would never be the same. He had crawled into hell, and was dragging her into it.


End file.
